Native Opera

Baritone Lawrence Sibbett will make himself a flat, broad nose next season. He will clap on a kinky black wig, cork hi. face. He will wear scarlet breeches, light blue coat, patent leather boots, brass spurs and swagger importantly around, showing off his pearl-handled revolver loaded with five ordinary bullets and a special silver one. All of a sudden he will hear the distant beat of tom-toms, 72 to a minute and he will start supposedly into a forest, spend his first bullet at thick of night on formless, brightwood creatures who will mock him. His second bullet will go for a Pullman porter, dead long before from a razor-slash in a crap game; his third for a prison-guard whose head he has already bashed with a shovel; his fourth and fifth for an auctioneer and a planter trying, he will imagine, to thrust him back into slavery. Rather than sacrifice himself at the command of a Congo witch-doctor he will shoot his sixth, silver bullet at a squirming, greenweed crocodile. But other black men will come after him with silver bullets then, still beating their tom-toms. They will bring him out of the forest dead, all his fine clothes gone except for underpants torn to look like a primitive breech cloth. It will be time then for people to decide whether or not Russian-born Louis Gruenberg has successfully translated Eugene Anhelous Emperor Jones into opera.

Last week it became known that Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera had decided to produce The Emperor Jones next season, that Conductor Erich Kleiber had decided to give it at the Staatsoper in Berlin. In both places it will be staged with the chorus of pursuing savages grouped out of the audience's sight at first, some underneath, some in front of the stage. As they draw nearer to Jones, first their hands will emerge, then their arms, then slowly their bodies. Jones's encounters in the forest will be shown on small, raised stages to indicate that they are taking place in his imagination.

The music will make climactic use of the tumtum beats conceived by Playwright Oneill. There will be a few lyric moments at least, when Jones calls on the Lord to save him. No one would predict the rest last week. Composer Gruenberg wrote his Jazziest and Enchanted Isle in ultramodern vein but the score he wrote for Jack & the Beanstalk (TIME, Nov. 30) was as simple and childlike as John Erskine's libretto.

The Metropolitan's financial woes have kept it prominently in the news all season and last week was no exception. The subscription sale opened for the shortened hwa season, went better than it has :or 25 years. Baritone Clarence White-lill's contract expired and as he announced lis departure, his intention to enter motion pictures, he took a parting thrust at Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza: "The Metropolitan is an Italian institution. . . .

"It needs a new American director, unbiased against Americans. . . ."

Mr. Gatti became personal too: "He [Baritone Whitehill] asked me to give him a contract for next season with possibly a larger number of performances than during the past season. ... I was very sorry to be unable to accede to his request, for two reasons: ) because his vocal condition in the past few years was such that complaints had been made by patrons of the opera; 2) because, having reduced the duration of the season from 24 to 16 weeks we already had enough contracts with other artists and were unable to offer him an engagement. . . ."

Three native operas besides The Emperor Jones will soon be on the market. Merry Mount, an opera dealing with the conflict between Puritans and Cavaliers, will be given by the Metropolitan season after next. Rochester's Howard Hanson wrote the music, Richard Leroy Stokes, critic of the defunct New York Evening World, the libretto. In Paris Alonzo (godsgate) Elliott, the Aleman who wrote "There's a Long, Long Trail,"-- is busy making an opera out of Laurence Stallings & Maxwell Anderson's riproaring What Price Glory? In Vienna Composer Robert Russell Bennett (Kansas City) will spend the summer writing music for a libretto by smart, versatile Robert A. Simon of The New Yorker. Maria Melbern, an oldtime Spanish prima donna, will be the heroine. The scene will be downtown Manhattan in the early 19th Century.

"Pet Puppies"

Berlin's leading functionaries gathered proudly a month ago to celebrate with music and speeches the soth birthday of their city's great Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler turned around to the audience for a change, started to talk. The audience shifted uncomfortably. This was no happy ending to a happy occasion. The conductor was praising his own orchestra at the expense of others. His auditors were startled when he referred to U. S. orchestras as "Luxu-shunde [pet puppies] which one keeps without inner necessity."

The speech started a great hodud in Berlin. The newspapers rebuked Herr Furtwangler for making unnecessary, unfriendly remarks. The U. S. Embassy protested to the German Foreign Office. Last week steam from the Berlin teapot reached the U. S. The pet puppy metamor was headlined in the news, vigorously attacked. People who remembered the circumstances of Herr Furtwangler's New York Philharmonic engagement were inclined to dismiss his statement as a case of wounded vanity. His first U. S. concerts (1924-25) were brilliant. But after Toscanini came he let himself be heckled by adverse press criticism, lost his confidence, his force. At the end of his 1926-27 engagement he was not invited to return for the next season. He has been invited since then, by the Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, but he has been quoted as saying he will never return until the ''Toscanini menace" has ended. Toscanini and Furtwangler were at Bayreuth together last summer (TIME, Aug. 3). Out of many unpleasant stories came Toscanini's statement that he would never return there.

daemia erred when it accepted New Haven chitchat, attributed "The Long, Long Derelict; to the late Edward J. Moriarty, New Haven barkeep (TIME, March 28).

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